Why do people keep suggesting that Twitter is somehow in any way a reasonable replacement for a good RSS client? I really don't get it, but maybe other people use RSS like twitter, or something...

I have many (~100) RSS feeds sorted into a few categories (one is news sites, one is webcomics, for example). Rather than manually polling all these sites I check my RSS list to scan through the post titles, then open new tabs *at the original site* for whatever items I actually want to read (control-click the little icon in Firefox). This makes sure the sites get their advertising and that I don't miss out on the things I want to know about. It's not rocket science, but it's been damn near impossible to find a tool that let me do this. It seems like a reasonable thing to want to do.

I guess the Open Source "way" is that I should start up a project with other disenfranchised code-savvy people and write something better, but I'm married with a full-time job and other issues with prior claim on my free time, so that ain't flying unless I win the lottery. Plus Google Reader is really slickly done. Everything else I've looked at is still crap by comparison in it's interface.

I think you meant "obvious mistake", but "oblivious" almost makes more sense these days.

I really like the idea of the editors leaving some obvious misstatement or typo in potentially controversial summaries to "prime the comment pump" (kind of like chumming the water...), but suspect that they really just aren't that advanced.

Never happen when money is on the line. I remember, back in Pennsylvania, the creekbeds always had a good stretch of uninhabited land around them (usually treated an unofficial parkspace).

One year someone bought up some of that land and built a bunch of brand new houses right up against the creek......and people (presumably from out of state) bought them. Then the next big rains came, and the creeks flooded, and the houses were all ruined.

I blame the exploitative bastards who shoved those homes in where 250+ years of experience said no homes should be.

Come on... please quote properly for full comedic effect."When I first came here, this was all swamp.Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them.It sank into the swamp.So I built a second one.That sank into the swamp.So I built a third.That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.But the fourth one stayed up.And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.

Every extra point of contact adds significant rolling (or sliding) friction.It's perfectly plausible that the energy cost of a ludicrous mechanism to minimize points of contact could end up more efficient than the straightforward solution of "more wheels".

That said, I'm skeptical of the big single flywheel working out well, since it seems like it would have a crazy effect on the handling (like old rotary biplanes, which could turn tighter in one direction because of the gyroscopic effect of the engine on the plane.)

I'm usually big on trying new things, but I think I've been in Gnome-land a little too long now (ever since I gave up FWVM) for that too work out well.Plus they borrowed a little too much from CDE, which I loathe with the burning passion of a thousand suns.

There is pretty much zero chance than my college project ended up in any consumer device, unless my advisor was seriously more evil and manipulative than I have been led to believe. I went into systems admin and most of the "hard" EE is a pleasant memory.

I recently moved from Fedora to Ubuntu because I'm trying to do more dev work and -all- the development tools and library releases these days seem to be more Ubuntu-friendly.

I was more Fedora-friendly because I came from a RedHat admin background, but I kept running into more and more projects/games/libraries that interpreted "LInux support" to mean Ubuntu, so I gave in. Since then it's actually worked out pretty well, although I still prefer yum to apt-get...

This is why my EE Senior project (long, long ago) was an inline box that would translate rotary pulses to DTMF so that you could use your cool old phones with modern systems. The trick was in the loop isolation, so voice could get passed through but not the dial breaks which modern systems interpreted as hanging up.

If I was doing it today, I'd make a rotary phone to VoiP converter instead. Actually an easier project, all things considered...

Of course, while this was long ago, it wasn't the 70s, so they still wouldn't have my device available.